Eric
“Lizzie, how is your week going?”
“Just peachy. I’ve put in too many hours this week, my boss is an idiot, and somehow five of my leave days have mysteriously disappeared after I called my boss a moron last week. Now, are you ready to tell me about the weekend or do I have to come visit you in person?” Her voice cracked like a whip and I winced.
I still wasn’t sure I was ready to have this conversation with her, but putting it off any longer would only make it worse. I’d already been dodging her phone calls for days. She’d called every night this week and her patience must have finally broken because she’d been calling for the last five minutes straight.
“My weekend went fine. The maintenance guys mowed the lawn and the new cute one took his shirt off again. I’m not sure what Mrs. Dawson said, but she was sitting on her patio calling out something, probably dirty knowing her, and he looked over and grinned. Then he whipped it off and kept going. I don’t know what they’re going to do about her. She’s gonna get arrested for sexual harassment one of these days.” I kept rambling, trying to put off the inevitable.
The story was true, though.
My friends from college all found fabulous apartments and interesting places to live. Some even owned their own homes. Me? I ended up in an entire complex surrounded by retirees. It was like an old folks’ home but without the cool amenities.
I was the only person under sixty in the whole place. It made for some great people-watching, though, better than reality TV most weeks. There was always some kind of gossip going around. Mrs. Dawson wasn’t even my most colorful neighbor.
“I don’t care about the sexy lawn guy and you know it.” She sounded like a general barking orders most of the time, but when she was frustrated, it took on a sharp edge that always made me want to apologize, even if I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I wasn’t the most confrontational person. That was one of the reasons I’d been dodging her phone calls. That, and she’d demand to talk about what had happened. In the past, she’d been really good at accepting my reservations about sharing, but lately, she’d started pushing me.
She said it was for my own good, but I wasn’t so sure about that. She pushed forward, not letting me ignore her questions. “Let’s start with something simple. Did you go to the club?”
That was easy. “Yes.”
“Was the guy you met online there?”
Still easy. “Yes.”
Lizzie had been the one to push me toward the site to begin with. It was a dating app that focused on the fetish community. She said she was tired of hearing about my boring weekends, and that I needed to get out and live a little.
Then she proceeded to lecture me about wasting my life and ignoring what I wanted by trying to date vanilla guys. I tuned her out because she’d given me the same lecture two or three times a month for almost a year, but that’s when she upped the stakes. She started a profile for me and said if I didn’t fill it out and look around, she would do it for me.
I believed her.
I decided that I’d rather post vague things on the site and pretend to look at it than see what she thought I would want. Over the years, I’d gotten good at ignoring the elephant in the room, but evidently, Lizzie decided it was time for me to grow up and address it.
That didn’t sound like such a good idea.
I’d learned that the hard way.
But once I got the profile up, the site was kind of addicting. I hadn’t lied on the profile, but I wasn’t that specific, either. I managed to check the box that said I was submissive, but I left the other parts that asked about specific fetishes blank. It was a start.
Not that I really wanted to date someone in the lifestyle, anyway.
I was content with how my life was going. Maybe I didn’t love my job and maybe I didn’t go out enough to make Lizzie happy, but it wasn’t bad. I still met up with the friends I’d made in college, and I even had a weekly poker game I went to. Several of the men in the building got together every Monday night and played while the women had girls’ night.
When they’d discovered I was gay, there had been an awkward conversation where they’d wanted to know if I’d prefer to go to girls’ night instead. They’d meant well, but it was weird. We’d ended up discussing the fact that being gay didn’t mean you had to get your nails done or go to the bingo hall to watch the cute guy who called out the numbers.
Well, maybe that one would have been fun.
They were getting better, but I still got weird questions. Once the complex upgraded the cable package to include HBO, they really got strange. I had to draw the line and say no more. If they were curious, they had to look it up like everyone else. I’d actually been pretty proud of myself for standing up to them. Not that a bunch of seventy-year-old men were that scary, but it was a step in the right direction. At least, that was what I told myself.
“Eric! Was he there?”
I fought the urge to sigh. “Unfortunately.”
She was quiet for a moment, clearly not expecting that response. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“He was a dick. Nothing like his profile at all and incredibly obnoxious.” That was an understatement.
“What happened?” She sounded like she was ready to go to battle for me.
“Oh no, Lizzie. I’m not going down that road. We’re just going to leave it at that.” I wasn’t going to detail everything that the ass had said. For one, it would only make me frustrated, and two, it would be weird. I’d end up telling her more about what I desired than I was comfortable with.
“Were you at least okay? It was in a public place, right? You were supposed to meet him in the lounge, not go into any private areas with him.” The general was back and curious for more details.
“I was fine. Yes, we were in the public area and he stormed off pretty fast.” Now I had to decide what else to say. “I ended up meeting a couple of guys and sitting with them for a while. They’d noticed things weren’t going well and came over to make sure I was okay.”
That seemed innocent enough.
“Doms or subs?”
Maybe not.
I would have loved to have been able to honestly say I had no idea, but that wouldn’t work. She knew me too well for me to lie. “Doms. They were polite and didn’t ask a thousand questions. Unlike somebody I know.”
She ignored me and kept going. “Were they single?”
“Lizzie, I’m not doing this. I had an okay time, but I’m just not sure about it. Now tell me what happened with your boss. Didn’t we have a discussion last week where we said you had to be polite even if he was an idiot? He’s the owner’s son and you have to remember that.”
She must have heard something in my voice because she backed off and let me change the subject. It was completely unlike her, but I was hoping she took pity on me. More than likely, it was just a strategic retreat so she could regroup. No matter which, I would enjoy the cease-fire while it lasted.
Sighing, she told me about the incident. Relief flooded through me and I felt like a deflating balloon. How was I supposed to tell her what had happened when I didn’t even know myself? The fact that we really didn’t talk about this part of my life at all didn’t make it any easier. When you were basically chased out of town, why would you want to talk about it?
After the rumors started in high school, it hadn’t taken long before someone called my parents. Lizzie and I had hidden the rest of the day at the park, trying to figure out the best way to handle the situation. But when I got home, all our plans were for nothing. I could see right away they hadn’t cared about the truth or about how I was feeling. They wanted confirmation that their son wasn’t gay or a deviant like they’d heard.
So that’s what I did.
I completely threw that ass under the bus and never felt a moment’s guilt. I pretended to be shocked, horrified, and completely stunned by what he’d said. Then I told them I couldn’t have known he was one of “those” kinds of people. That when I’d rejected his advances, he’d started rumors about me.
When they wanted to know why, I never said anything about his behavior; I lied again. I said I hadn’t wanted anyone to get the wrong idea. That just because I found the conduct unsuitable didn’t mean I wanted everyone to become aware of that.
I’d lowered my voice a little and leaned forward like I was sharing some kind of secret. Then I’d shaken my head and talked about people judging you when you didn’t support their shocking choices. I made a very convincing bigot, even if I did say so myself.
Yeah, maybe it was the wrong thing to do, and maybe some people would have given me crap for not being out and proud, but I didn’t want to end up on the street. So I lied my ass off. After a long discussion, it was decided that staying in town where rumors would ruin my “reputation” wasn’t the best choice.
Because of my dad’s job, moving wasn’t an option for them, but I had an aunt on the east coast they thought might take me in. So they’d called, I’d packed, and the next morning, I was on the first flight out. I still had no idea what line of shit they gave her, but when I got to the airport, Aunt Sylvia took one look at me and shook her head.
“Couldn’t tell them you were gay, huh? I don’t blame you. Those two are the biggest homophobic idiots I’ve ever met.” She was my dad’s sister, but not surprisingly, they weren’t close.
She said I set off her gaydar even when I was little. Before seeing her at the airport, I hadn’t visited with her since I was twelve, so I was floored. I shook my head and told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d just smiled and said she’d seen the way I looked at the neighbor boy and there was no reason to hide from her.
She’d been right on both accounts. The guy, teenager really, who lived next door when I was younger had been the most perfect man I thought I’d ever see, and she didn’t care one way or the other about my sexuality. Aunt Sylvia also didn’t care about what else she might have heard from my parents, because the other part was never brought up.
When Lizzie tracked me down a few months later, she’d laid into me for not telling her about the move and what my parents had said, but hadn’t said anything about the rumors either. We’d kept in touch, but we’d never talked about it. Over the years, she’d lectured me about finding the “right” kind of guy or she’d ask if I’d met anyone “special” but that was about as close as she came, until recently.
I didn’t know if she’d been reading one too many self-help books lately or what, but all of a sudden she’d wanted to talk about me getting more comfortable with myself—code for more open and willing to tell people what a freak I was. And how I needed to stop dating guys who had no interest in my preferences.
That was when the online dating site came up.
My trip down memory lane hadn’t helped me figure out how I felt about the club or about the people I’d met. Sure, Master Samuel had been a total loser who not only hadn’t wanted a “caring” experience, he also hadn’t wanted to take things slowly like we’d agreed.
I might not have come out and said I was looking for a daddy, but I thought the caring part was a good hint. Caring…caretaking…taking care. It sounded reasonable when I was going through his profile. After meeting him, I wasn’t so sure. But he’d also had all kinds of interests listed and had said he was open to new things.
The little devil on one shoulder was a grumpy ass that said we weren’t going to try anything like that again. The naughty one on the other shoulder kept pointing out how much we wanted a daddy. And that I needed more human contact that was real, not just in my imagination.
It was probably from working on the phones all day. Eventually, people were just disconnected voices, so it was just a little step to talking back to the voices in your head. Yup, I needed real people. Maybe I’d go see if anyone was down by the pool. No one got in it, for reasons I didn’t quite understand, but there were always people playing card games and talking. I was becoming pretty good at gin.
“Are you even listening?”
I cringed. “No, sorry.”
“Eric.” She said it with more of a sigh in her voice than frustration, so it didn’t seem like I was in the doghouse, but it was getting close.
“I’m just distracted.”
“Lots on your mind?”
She ignored my snort. “Still don’t want to talk about the date? Well, almost date?”
“No.” Not at all.
She tried another tactic. “Do you want to talk about your job?”
“God, no.”
She laughed. “Weren’t you supposed to be figuring out what you wanted to do when you grew up?”
That was another issue that had been driving me crazy lately. Not the fact that my job sucked. It did, but that wasn’t the problem. It paid the bills, and I had good benefits. The issue was that people didn’t see it as a real job, Lizzie included.
I couldn’t decide if discussing insurance with people over the phone was what I wanted to be doing forever. However, with a business degree I hadn’t wanted in the first place, I was stuck. It’d seemed like a good idea at the time, and my parents had approved. They were also paying for my degree, so it hadn’t seemed right to rock the boat.
I was starting to regret that decision.
“I’m fine for now. I’ll figure it out eventually.” I liked talking to my customers. Most were funny and chatty. I also didn’t mind the odd hours. The pay was at least halfway decent, so I couldn’t complain too much.
“All right, I won’t bug you this time.” The tone in her voice told me it wasn’t going to be much of a reprieve.
“But next time’s still up for grabs?” I wasn’t going to let her think she’d fooled me.
“Of course,” she cheerfully admitted.
“Thanks.”
“It’s just because I love you.”
And because she thought I should have my shit figured out by now. Maybe I should’ve. Most of my friends had theirs together. I’d just felt like I was floating through life the past couple of years and couldn’t seem to steer things in the right direction. Aunt Sylvia said I was lost because I wasn’t listening to my inner voice.
That was ridiculous, because I had two and they were always in conflict with one another.
“I know. Hey, I’ve got errands I need to run. I’ll give you a call later in the week.” It was a complete lie and she could probably guess, but I needed an out. Between the work questions and her trying to get me to date more interesting people, it felt like I was being run over by a freight train.
“Okay, but no more ignoring my calls.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Bye, Lizzie.”
“Night.”
Running away from my problems wasn’t going to solve any of them, but sometimes it felt like the only way to deal with them. It was this enormous catch-22. I wanted help to figure things out. But to do that, I’d have to talk to someone about them to begin with.
I just wasn’t sure I could do it.
Maybe I was making it harder than I needed to, but when I thought about talking to someone, my stomach rolled and I had this urge to walk away. Running wasn’t my best option, but it was all I had.